"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Most Beautiful

Plato, Hippias Major 291 d-e (Hippias speaking; tr. W.R.M. Lamb):

I say, then, that for every man and everywhere it is most beautiful to be rich and healthy, and honored by the Greeks, to reach old age, and, after providing a beautiful funeral for his deceased parents, to be beautifully and splendidly buried by his own offspring.

περιστείλαντι: περιστέλλω is the techical term for dressing a corpse, on which custom see Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985; rpt. 1988), pp. 24-26 and note ("Funeral garments") on p. 139. Liddell-Scott-Jones say that in this passage it means simply "bury," but I doubt whether the primary sense ("dress, clothe, wrap up") was ever lost sight of.

Lamb didn't translate ἀεὶ; I would add it, e.g. "I say, then, that always and for every man and everywhere..."